


At the End of the Road (I'll Call Out a Name)

by ehre_wahrheit



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: "you" is whoever reader wants it to be, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Fluff, Future Fic, Multi, POV Original Character, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, i suppose because he needs it, spans several years, this is for alex, wrote this for three years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 09:23:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7309366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehre_wahrheit/pseuds/ehre_wahrheit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex comes back to Chelsea, years after The Year That Changed His Life. He is now a father, a husband, and a brother - and he needs to finally let go.</p><p>-</p><p>Second part of the title comes from Luck Life's Call Out a Name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the End of the Road (I'll Call Out a Name)

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this in 2013, when I haven't yet read either Scorpia Rising or Alligator Tears. I thought it was finished, but I reread it and rewrote the ending scene.
> 
> As stated in the tags, "you" can be whoever you (the reader) wants it to be: race, gender, sexual orientation. It is never explicitly stated who "you" really is. Halfway through rereading, I realized I had no idea, either. I wanted this to be a feel-good piece (for me, for Alex) but it turned out to be a Fix Alex in 4000 Words kind of fic.

You’re looking at the pictures that dot the hallway when arms wrap around you. You take a deep breath—your natural reaction to being surprised—and you calm down immediately after you recognize the scent of Alex’s subtle cologne, one you’ve been breathing in every morning before he leaves and every evening when you arrive home.

“I know you’ve been wondering,” he whispers against your neck, his breath tickling the sensitive hairs there. “I know you’ve always wanted to ask questions about me. You’ve always wanted to know who the man you married truly is. I know that look in your eye—that look you get when I’m holding Jack and you wonder, you wonder. _Who are you?_

“I hope, I hope,” he says, and he whispers your name like a prayer, “I hope this answers your questions. I hope you’ll still love me when you finally find out.”

You turn around in his arms, bringing your own to wrap around his neck, and you bury your nose against his shirt. He holds you to him, tight, and warm, and perfect, and you try not to allow your mind to create the worst possible scenarios. You can’t help it, though. You have always been the worrier. It’s part of your nature.

 

And you remember, you remember, all those times in the past twenty years that you have asked yourself, truly, just who Alex Pleasure truly is.

You asked yourself, when he asked you out for the first time, on the first night you met at a college party. He had been the perfect gentleman—all flirts and smiles and giving you space to agree whether you wanted to talk to him or not.

But who would be insane enough to say no to _Alex Pleasure_? He’s the perfect man: light hair, dark eyes, tall build, perfect musculature—you’re sure he’s the wet dream of every gay boy and straight girl and—well—everyone out there. Of course you’d agreed on the date. He had laughed, and blushed, bashful, and he’d leant in and whispered in your ear, _I can’t believe you said yes._

You’d wanted to swoon, right then and there, but your friends were there. Your friends were there, and they never knew you’d had a thing for Alex.

(To be fair, neither have you. It was a pleasant surprise all around.)

You asked yourself, again, on the night of your first anniversary. You had planned a romantic dinner at the apartment you now share with him—but you serve all your favorites, because he never tells you if he had one. When you ask, he simply smiles and says, _I like it all_. All this time, you’ve taken it in stride. On the night of your anniversary, you ask yourself, _just what do I know about him, then_?

In retrospect, you realize, in the year you’ve known him, you know nothing about him at all. You simply know that his name is Alex Pleasure, and that he grew up in London—thus the British accent. He came to America when he was fourteen but left again just a few months after he turned fifteen. You don’t know what happened in the time between then and the time you met, because he simply says he came back and has decided to stay.

He is nineteen, now.

And you’re not even sure when his birthday is—you just found a birthday card from his parents on the coffee table. There was no date. When you asked him, he shrugged and said it didn’t matter.

And you’d been scared, because you knew nothing about the person you were living with, you’ve been dating for a year. But you sit down on the small table you’ve prepared, the scent of candles and roses pungent in the air, and you try not to let your nerves show on your face.

When he comes home, he doesn’t come home alone.

He comes home on the night of your first anniversary with the first of his family you have ever met, his sister, Sabina Pleasure. She is a beautiful blonde—pale where Alex is tanned, slim where Alex is muscled.

If you were being honest, they don’t look like siblings at all.

In the span of one night you find out more about Alex Pleasure than you have in the year you’ve been together.

You find out that he had been adopted in London, thus his move only at the age of fourteen. He and Sabina had dated for a few months—but it didn’t work out, and so they broke up, and they admit they’re better for it.

(That fact had made you uncomfortable for a moment, but you let it go quickly. It was in the past. Besides, they’re only legal siblings, not by blood.)

In the subsequent years and milestones of your lives—the first house, finally meeting Mr. and Mrs. Pleasure, graduating college, getting your first dog, Alex getting his medical degree, you finally getting a teaching position at the local school—you never thought to ask yourself again.

On the night he asks you to marry him, he gives you a ring that’s a little too big for the both of you. It’s old and scratched, but the insignia is unmistakable on the face of the small granite plate where, in usual engagement rings, a diamond would have been found.

The insignia was that of a small knife—or feather, you aren’t sure. There are four letters surrounding it. The deepest, oldest engravings were the letters _H_ and _J_. Afterwards there are two more— _I_ and another _J_.

“Whose is it?” you had asked, curious, your fingertips running through the engravings. His exes? Family?

He had simply smiled, kissed you, and told you he loved you.

You never doubted his words.

On that night, though, while he slept curled around you, arms around your body, face against your neck, you hear the first hints of his past that has ever come from him in the faint murmurs of dreams.

 _Yassen_ , he says. _Yassen_.

It’s the first time you’ve ever heard him say anything like it, but you don’t say anything when he wakes up.

In the next few years, you get more and more glimpses of who your fiancé truly is. He gets visits, sometimes, from people you do cannot truly describe but whose bearings are different from those of the people you and Alex usually hang out with.

(Again, mostly because they’re _your_ friends. He doesn’t have friends he introduces you to. He doesn’t even fully introduce the people who visit you in your own home.)

Even when you don’t mean to, you hear them call Alex little monikers—like Cub, or, at one time, someone even calls him _Little Spy_. You want to ask him, then, just ask him, who he truly is, but you can’t. Not when, after those visits, you see a light in his eyes you have never seen before.

Sometimes when Alex is exhausted—usually after a round or three of sex—you see a faint glimmer of that same light in his eyes, while he’s smiling up at the ceiling, his arms around you or yours around him. Sometimes he hums a song you have never heard of. The first time you asked him, he’d stopped completely, he had frozen, and then he had deflated, as if losing all sense of life.

You’ve learned to just let him go about his own little ritual of post-sex humming and cuddling. It’s weird when he says people’s names as he holds you, because you don’t know what these people mean— _who’s Yassen? Who’s Phillip?_ —but you let it slide in favor of seeing a small part of Alex you’ve never truly seen before.

So you don’t ask him. You just smile, kiss him, and ask him if he’d enjoyed his talk with his friends. He doesn’t correct you. He simply agrees.

On his bad nights, Alex murmurs _Jack_ , over and over again, in more and more distressing tones as he falls into deeper sleep. On those nights, you wake him up and you hold him as he stares in the air and whispers apologies to someone long gone, someone he will never be able to grasp and hold again—someone who means to him probably more than you can ever imagine.

You realize that you should take notes of all the names that he murmurs in his sleep. Maybe one day he’ll tell you all about them, tell you why he only allows himself free reign to speak of them when he is unconscious, or when he’s about to fall off of consciousness. But you don’t. You don’t, because you understand grief—though maybe not the kind of grief your Alex goes through, but still, you understand.

His first worst night happens on the night you get married. You’ve just had marathon sex—of course, as expected of a newlywed couple—and it’s the first time you have ever seen him sob and scream in his sleep.

 _Julius_! he cries. _No, no, no!_

And, even worse, again.

_Yassen, please. Yassen!_

It breaks your heart.

It breaks _you_ —especially when he doesn’t let you hold him whenever it happens. He holds you right after, when he’s calmed down, and he apologizes and he cries and he begs for comfort in the worst way possible—by pushing you away.

So you tell him you love him, even though it makes him cry harder.

You hold him tighter, even though he only trembles worse when you do.

 

On the day you bring home your son for the first time, Alex breaks down. You don’t tell him that the reason you decided on calling your son _Jack_ was because he’d said it in his sleep. You simply tell him it’s the name of your late grandfather, because it is.

“Hey, baby boy,” he whispers to your son, his voice trembling and shaking and you want to cry along with him, “hey, you’re home. You’re home, baby.”

You hold him from behind, pushing your face against his shoulder blades as he shakes. You cannot determine whether he’s crying in grief or in happiness. He doesn’t let Jack sleep in his room alone for three years.

And so, until baby Jack is a toddling three-year-old, he sleeps between his parents in the master’s bedroom. You win the baby’s first word contest. When he starts talking, Alex realizes that he can’t sleep in the master’s bedroom anymore—not with the erratic hours he takes in the hospital. And so, reluctantly, he allows for Jack to sleep in the nursery you and he had made for your son when you planned on having kids for the first time.

On the first night of Jack sleeping in the nursery, Alex doesn’t sleep in your bed.

In the morning, you find him slouched against the baby bed, holding Jack against his chest, both of them asleep. It touches something in your heart, that image, and you don’t wake him up.

He makes the excuse of your son having a nightmare.

 

You meet Sabina’s family when Jack turns eight years old. She has triplet five year old boys, and apparently, she’d married Alex’s middle school best friend, Tom, who you meet for the first time then, too.

Sabina’s triplets, named Yasha, John, and Ian, made Alex break down crying on the day they were introduced. It’s obvious that Alex favors Yasha the most, holding him tenderly, with trembling hands and lips, as he mouths the name over and over again. He doesn’t say it out loud.

“It’d been his idea,” Sabina says softly, her hand on her brother’s shoulder as he holds her youngest son. With her tone, you suffice she isn’t talking about Tom. Sabina’s husband is simply looking on with a grief in his eyes that breaks your heart, because this—this you _cannot_ understand. You simply do not.

“He wanted so much for you,” Sabina whispers, kissing Alex’s shoulder in an intimacy you have never seen them share before. “He talked to me. He _did_ , and I don’t know what he planned for your future—”

“It was this,” Alex had replied brokenly, pulling Yasha even closer to his chest. “He had always wanted _this_.”

As you listen, finally accepting that you’re just _you, an outsider,_ someone who may never belong, not completely, you realize that she hadn’t been talking about Alex, either.

 

When your son turns fourteen, Alex invites you to go to London. You, of course, having never been there, agree immediately—and he walks you around Chelsea, to a beautiful old house, one that brings nostalgia to his eyes.

“This is where I grew up,” he’d told you and Jack.

“Welcome home.”

A woman was there, with dark skin and regal posture, whose smile was small but welcoming, and Alex had gone to give her a hug. Jack, being the one fascinated with his father, had followed quickly.

“This is—this is Jack,” Alex had told the woman, gesturing to your teenaged son. A toddling boy follows when you allow him to walk, ensuring he goes to his father. “And this is little Alex, junior.”

The woman had laughed, but her laughter had been tinged with a small ounce of regret and old pain. She had patted both of your children’s heads. “I hope you don’t turn out to be as devious as your father, though you have obviously gotten his looks.”

Alex had laughed, and then looked at you. “Oh, that’s all your doing,” he says, and you smile and step forward. “This is Mrs. Jones,” Alex tells you.

You introduce yourself but she only gives a secretive smile and says, “I know.”

And she’d known.

 

Now you’re looking at a picture of a boy in the arms of a man in military fatigues and a woman in a nurse’s uniform. You reach out to touch the frame.

“This is you,” you whisper to Alex, and he nods.

“And those are Helen and John Rider.” He takes your hand, his thumb brushing against the ring on the fourth finger of your left hand. “ _H_ and _J_.”

“Alex Rider,” you say. He buries his face against your neck and he sighs.

He says your name. You smile at the picture—Alexei looks exactly like Alex did when he was a toddler, then. It’s not as if they need to prove Alex’s paternity (there are several documents proving he’s the kid’s father), but it’s still a little reassuring finally seeing little bits and pieces of Alex in this old house.

It’s old, but it doesn’t look run down. It looks well-kept and managed, still warm, cozy, and welcoming as if people have lived here in the years the owner had lived in another house.

“I want to move back to London,” he tells you. “I think it’s high time I—I moved on with my life.”

You take his hand in yours, and you squeeze. “What are you moving on from?” you ask. You want to hear him say it, no matter how bad of a partner that makes you. You want him to admit to his fears and his grief because he’s been hiding it for years; he has been suffering through it for years, even though he’s promised himself to you, _for you_ , for both of you to walk together through thick and thin.

You stare at the picture-perfect family framed against a wall in a hallway of a house in Chelsea, and you realize just how in love with Alex you have always been. You still are. You bring his hand up to your face and you kiss his knuckles.

His other arm tightens around you. “Come on. The kids are wreaking havoc in the kitchen. The snacks are ready.”

He lets you go but he wraps his fingers around yours, sure and strong, pulling you behind him as you walk. You keep looking at the interspersed framed pictures hanging on the walls—some of them are postcard-perfect images of the horizon, others are the images of a love that seems as tragic as the sudden end of the hallway that opens to the kitchen.

Jack is sitting by the bar, holding a bottle of soda on one hand as he talks to a rather large man—dark skin, big muscles… honestly, you think he looks like a bouncer at a bar. When the man turns to smile at you, you blush and smile back.

Alexei has plopped himself on the floor, being doted on by Sabina, Mrs. Jones, and a young man around your age, who smiles big and comes forward to wrap arms around Alex when they see each other.

“Alex, my man! I see you’ve grown quite well,” he says warmly, intimately—so warmly that it’s _you_ who blushes at their familiarity. The man looks at Alexei and then at Jack at the bar, before he gets distracted by Tom and Sabina’s boys. “And who are _these_?” he asks, bending a little to be eye-level with the kids.

The eldest in age yet youngest at heart among them giggles and shyly says, “John,” before grabbing for his uncle’s shirt to hide behind him. The man laughs and looks at the next one.

It’s the youngest, the most quiet among all of them. “You are?” the man asks quietly, smiling in comfort and encouragement.

You feel Alex tense before the boy even says his name out loud. “Yasha,” he says. “My name is Yasha.”

You and the man both glance at Alex at the same time. Actually, all of you do—you register the look of bereft happiness on his face, the amused sadness…

“Then you must be Ian,” the man tells the last of the three boys to enter the kitchen. Ian nods, before walking off to join Jack at the bar, asking his mom for a soda as well. The man and Alex had walked off, and you want to join them, but you feel Alexei tug on your shirt, asking you to carry him.

You do, and you sit down by the table. Yasha and John follow you quietly, both of them speaking about the latest episode of some anime or TV show as they reach for Alexei to play.

You still have no idea who Alex is, but you’re slowly getting the picture of who _Yasha_ is—was—to him. You allow the boy to take Alexei from your lap, watching the soft fondness he has for the toddler.

“Hey,” John calls. You look at him in question. “Mum said this is your house. But you live near us. Why?”

You smile. “This is Uncle Alex’s house, John,” you say. “We live near you for now, but we’re coming to live here in a bit.”

He frowns. “So we won’t see Jack and Alex anymore?”

You laugh. “Of course you’ll still see your cousins, silly. Just not as often as you did when we lived in America.”

John’s frown doesn’t disappear from his face for a few more moments until he nods, apparently satisfied. “Okay.” He looks at his brother. “You really like Alex, don’t you.”

Yasha shrugs. “I love him.”

“And me?”

Yasha looks at him flatly. You’re surprised—you cannot believe a twelve-year-old could pull it off so… so perfectly. Yasha may have just become your favorite nephew. “You’re my brother, stupid. Of course I love you.”

John laughs at that and ruffles Yasha’s hair, much to the younger boy’s annoyance. The way they interact with each other… you feel something tugging at your heart. When John walks away, it’s Ian who joins you and at the table, immediately taking Alexei from his brother and sitting down on John’s vacated seat.

Yasha rolls his eyes, kisses your cheek, and walks off, tugging at his father’s jacket and asking for soda. You look back at Ian and you see him just… just hugging Alex, eyes closed. He looks apologetic, but devious at the same time.

“I don’t think I like what you’re planning, little one,” you tell him, and he opens his eyes and grins at you.

“I’m going to teach him all my tricks,” he says. “Even _John_ doesn’t know,” he whispers theatrically. “Alex is going to be awesome!”

You shake your head and sigh for the future. Ian is a well-known troublemaker in the family, and Alex is—fortunately at times, unfortunately in this case—a very fast learner. You’re sure you’re going to be handling a very tiring child soon.

“He was born in a small town in Russia,” someone whispers against your neck, and you almost yelp as hands rest against your hips. You hit Alex’s thigh in admonition for surprising you. “Sorry, babe,” he says, as he kisses your neck. Ian scrunches his nose and walks off, carrying Alex with him towards the other boys. “My Yasha, I mean. He was born in Russia.”

The way he says _mine_ has just confirmed your suspicions. You take a deep breath, and then squeeze his hand. You’re watching the child Yasha as he speaks, drinking soda and rolling his eyes at whatever your son had said. “And then?”

“He met my dad when he was young. He’d been through so much.” He squeezes you. “And then my—my dad died. And—we met when I was fourteen, for the first time. We got together on the same thing just—just on different sides of the board, I guess.

“And then I promised I’d do something stupid.” He laughs softly. “We meet again. And then I thought he’d died.” He swallows, his throat clicking. “We met an accident. After that—after that I had to stay. And then… and then someone—

“I moved to the US. One year later he contacted me. Yasha. He told me he’d meet me at the—here, at this house in Chelsea. When I got here…” this time his laughter is wet with tears, and you feel him bury his face against your shoulder. Your heart breaks for him, even when it starts a jackhammer rhythm for yourself—for your fate, for the end of this story, for both of your futures… for the future of your children. “…he was cooking _dinner_ , right here.” He pointed at the bar, right at where Jack was seated, surrounded by his cousins and brother. “He was standing right there, J—” he stops. Chokes. Breathes. “He was wearing—wearing Jack’s apron.”

“Jack?” you ask. You’ve always wanted to know, ever since he’d screamed that name in his sleep. Who is Jack? Why do they mean so much to Alex?

“Jack Starbright,” Alex says softly, the name a lullaby, a comfort. “She took care of me before my parents died. She stayed with me after Uncle Ian did, too.”

Your eyes scan the children in your family. It seems as if all of them were—were reincarnations of people in Alex’s life, in some way or another.

“She died.” His tone is flat. “He served me… Yasha cooked me Thai food that night. It’s—it’s not my favorite cuisine, but. I’ve always loved his cooking,” he whispers, and you feel something cold touch the skin of your neck. You reach back to hold his head. “We talked, after that. He explained why he wasn’t dead, why he never—never contacted me until then.

“I ran away from home. With him.” He breathes. “He never asked, but I never hesitated. I—I’d been in love with him for so _long_ I didn’t hesitate to join him when he said he was leaving.

“We got separated along the way, but he always promised me the same thing—that, that he’ll come get me soon. And he always did. He always did, and when he died I didn’t know who was supposed to come for me anymore. I got so lost—I was so angry that—I came back to London. I demanded answers.

“I got what I was looking for, but it—those didn’t help me at all.

“Sabina—Sabina did. She told me Yasha came to _her_. I—everything I’ve done from that point until now, I’ve done for him and—and I can’t let him _go_ , why can’t I just _let him go?_ I’m so in love you and still in love with him and I love our kids and Sabina and Tom and Phillip and the triplets—how can I still be in love with _him?_

“He’s dead. He’s dead, for good this time, and I can’t do anything to bring him back but pretend that in some way, we’re getting the happy ending we’ve both always wanted by looking at you, at the kids, and knowing that—that this was what he’d always wanted for me.

“And that hurts me the worst,” he says, and he’s out of breath and so are you. You feel the grief, the pain, the anger in his words—emotions you have never felt from him before, pouring out because of this. You close your eyes and push your head against him. He’s quivering and quietly sobbing against you. “ _He’s_ the one hurting me the most, because this is the life he’s always wanted for me.

“ _Normal_. And—and, not with _him_.”

You turn around and you hold him against you, his arms coming around you as he cries. Sabina had already ushered everyone to the living room a few minutes earlier, to your gratefulness, and you hold Alex and kiss his head and do your best to comfort him.

“Doesn’t that just prove how much he had loved you?” you ask him softly, running your hand through his hair, rubbing against his scalp. “Doesn’t that show just how much you meant to him, that he wouldn’t have minded not being there for the person he loves as long as they're happy?”

“I’m sorry,” Alex sobs, and you get the feeling that this is the first time he’s allowed himself to grieve so obviously in a while. “I’m so sorry I love someone _dead_ , someone who—who isn’t you—I’m sorry I’m a liar—”

“You still love me,” you tell him forcefully, holding his face in your hands. You kiss him. “You still love me, and I know you’ve loved before me. And it’s okay to love someone so much that you can’t let them go until you’ve finally accepted that there’s nothing to lose when you do. Letting go of the love you have for Yasha doesn’t write it off as _nothing_ , Alex, just as loving him all these years never overrode the fact that you’ve loved _me_.

“You’ll always love him. That’s a fact. But you have to let go of the grief and the pain and accept that this is _his_ love for you. That _he loves you,_ too, Alex, he does. I don’t know him, I never have, but Alex—Alex, seeing you now, seeing how you love, I know that he gave you everything he could while he could.

“And I’m happy you experienced that. I’m happy you had that, because now you’ll know what to do with _me_. I’ve seen you struggling through our years together, Alex. I’ve seen how you’re afraid that holding me will break me. You won’t. I’m not unbreakable, but I’m not fragile.

“And I’m _yours_ , just as much as Yasha had been, just as much as everyone you’ve ever held and loved always will be.

“And I love you.”

He sobs. “I love you,” he says. “I love you, so much.”

You kiss his forehead. “I still don’t know you,” you say, “but I’m willing to learn and listen.”

There’s a silence that envelopes you, the kitchen, the house. But it’s not the kind of silence that makes you itch, makes you uncomfortable. It’s not the kind of silence that comes from anger, from betrayal, from finally finding out the truth. No, this silence is the silence of a lover’s touch, the silence of a mother’s kiss, the silence of a beloved’s smile.

And oh, how your beloved _smiles_.

“I love you,” you tell him, fiercely, because you do, because you have, because you always will. You still have a long way to go, but you’re willing to traverse even the thorniest of paths as long as he’ll be there at the end of the road. You know that he'll still have nightmares, that he'll still grieve in his dreams, enough to call out the names of people you now know he had  _loved_.

But you don't mind. Not really. Instead, you close your eyes, and it's almost as if you can see all of them: all of the people Alex had loved, had lost. All of the people who had  _loved_ him. You see Helen, and John - the latter the same exact face as the man in your arms. You see Jack Starbright, exuberant and motherly; Ian Rider, who is stern but protective.

You see  _Yasha_ , but he corrects you and says,  _it's Yassen, now, love,_ and the way his eyes meet yours pieces your broken heart together. And you step forward and you take their hands and hearts and you  _promise_ , you promise you'll love their Alex forever, make him happy, make him yours, and when you open your eyes it's to see Alex smiling as bright as a summer day.

**Author's Note:**

> I might explore this universe, in the future. Come hit me up at [ Tumblr ](http://ehre-wahrheit.tumblr.com).
> 
> (Also I'm kinda new to this writing style. I don't know why it's so different to my usual. It's comfortable for angst, though.)


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